This is a genre. If nobody else has made it into one, I hereby do. I just played some hours of Babbdi. I've had nightmares pretty much exactly like this: Brutalist architecture, hostile to humans within. Deep shadows. You got to find a way out but there may be none. The game populates the place with depressed potatohead-people you can talk to but won't get much out of.
This makes the city look prettier than it is from the inside.
It doesn't look like it but mechanically this is a parcours-game with a bit of metroidvania sprinkled into it. There are well hidden places you can only reach with specific items. Some of them make you feel like you're on the cusp of getting something about the mystery of this place but never quite get there. It's like a book by Jeff Vandermeer. It teases you. It will not reveal its secrets to you.
If you've ever dreamt of exploring brutalist architecture and post-soviet decay, this (free!) game is awesome. The dreary atmosphere has the greyness of the city, its sickly-looking people (even the sewer-rave looks desperate) and the inscrutable world that you can only leave with a train ticket that is no longer being sold. It's all a bit Kafka. I love it.
To prove that this is actually a bit of a niche genre, I will show at least one more game like this soon.
Lately, my son and I have been having table top strategy battles of different flavours. We used mostly One Page Rules (Grimdark Future FTL Warfleets and Grimdark Future Firefights) and some Brikwars (Quickwars-Rules with some house rules attached). I'm not sure where the sweet spot is but as somoene who has been burned by Games Workshops as a teen, I really like systems where you do not need a massive army of minis to fight cool battles on the table.
Like I stated before, anyone can make space ships for Grimdark Future FTL Warfleets from scratch. When it comes to infantry in something like Grimdark Future Firefights, I can't make those myself but one investment into, say, a WH40K Tau scout squad, will set you up with all you need for less than 40 Euros. That's what my son did last week. He could conveivably make two armies of 300 points each out of that set but he only wants to make one anyways.
Anyhow I noticed that there are several very different aspects of the miniature wargaming hobby you can enjoy (or not):
1. Planing your army. Thinking about what to take into battle, what to equip, what their background is. I really like that part.
2. Building your minis.* Some buy whole, some like to craft fine details and customized the crap out of the minis. Others will just take Legos and be done with it.
3. Painting your minis. A distinct step from the one above because people will take stock 40K-Marines and turn them into works of art but eshew any actual crafting in the process. I always disliked painting minis (a lot).
4. Actually playing the game (!). Whether cometitively or just for fun and laughs with friends (different games demand a different level of seriousness, after all). Rolling dice, measuring distances, outwitting your enemy. Like.
*Making a tonk is fun. Playing it is as well. Look at what these two guys (blokes?) are doing with it:
Fuck yeah! The kids and I built several tonks by now. The only downside is the massively printer-unfriendly (but free!) rules doc.
But lets ramble on back to our four kinds of enjoyment of the hobby. I'll go through all table top strategy games I've _ever_ played and rate them on the fun-scale on each four accounts. Also how many units you'll typically field and how much of a money sink they are because yes, that is a big factor.
Warhammer Fantasy Battles (sometime in the late 90s)
1. Planning?
Very fun. Lots of options, a ton of armies to choose from, highly customizable. Liked it.
2. Building?
Medium. You could mod stuff but with metal figures it was hard and also GW didn't like too drastic a change (or god forbid third-party-minis) if you wanted to play tournaments at their stores.
3. Painting?
Lots of painting to be done, that's for sure. For a lot of people this was the main draw of the hobby. I myself didn't like it but that's just me.
4. Actually playing?
Slow and tedious but all together okay. It didn't really help that we all had different states of information and that the chaos players always seemed to be cheating.
5. How many guys?
Lots. My dark elves army had like 100 minis in it and that was a normal-sized army.
6. How much money?
Too much. Fuck you, GW. I spent most of my pocket money on dark elves for several years and then they rebootet them, making my entire army worthless.
Warhammer 40K (sometime in the late 90s)
1. Planning? Pretty much the same as with Warhammer Fantasy.
2. Building?
I think there are more opportunities for customizing in 40k, because there are more weapon-loadouts and more war machines you can modify.
3. Painting?
Same as fantasy.
4. Actually playing?
Didn't play as much 40k as fantasy. I remember that my dark eldar sucked.
5. How many guys?
I think it was fewer models on average than fantasy but it's in the same general area of army-size. Many.
6. How much money?
Too much, I still think.
BrikWars 2001
1. Planning?
Almost too many options. You gotta think up a theme and then stick to it. I loved it, still dream myself into the paracosm I made up as the background of my three different armies in BrikWars.
2. Building?
It's Lego. If you love it, you love it.
3. Painting?
Nope.
4. Actually playing?
Fun but don't expect a balanced experience. Also it can take a while if you have complex vehicles (worst of all: robots and/or super-power-users).
5. How many guys?
As many as you want/have. I think the biggest battle I ever fought had around sixty minifigs on my side but also like two dozen vehicles.
6. How much money?
Lego isn't cheap but if you already have it...
QuikWars / BrikWars Lite
1. Planning?
Much quicker than the original BrikWars but also much less detailed. If you obsess over the difference between a sabre and a warhammer or a revolver and an uzi, this isn't for you.
2. Building?
It's Lego. But you will likely destroy much of it.
3. Painting?
Nope.
4. Actually playing?
Quick and messy. Played this with my kids a few times. It's usually quite the massacre.
5. How many guys?
Easier to handle large numbers of dudes than the original but still, I wouldn't want to have more than a few dozen units on the table.
6. How much money?
Same as BrikWars 2001.
Next Generation Special Force
This one I made myself. It uses Lego Technics dudes and weapons I made mostly from cardboard and warhammer paint. It's for having small squads fight each other.
1. Planning?
Takes a lot of planning. I made the rules myself but it is a complex game.
2. Building?
You gotta make any weapon from scratch. Also all other gear for your Lego Technics-guys.
3. Painting?
Equipment and weaponry not included. Make it.
4. Actually playing?
Very detail-oriented: Kneeling, being prone, sprinting. How many shots to fire in a turn. It's for the people who enjoyed video games like Jagged Alliance.
5. How many guys?
I only have eight figures for this but that seems close to what I can handle anyways. You could conceivably double that but I think more than that and it gets too bogged down with paperwork.
6. How much money?
Don't know. Second hand figures go between 5 and 10 Euros upon my last check. You could build a squad for around 30 Euros.
One Page Rules Grimdark Future Firefight
1. Planning?
Takes a moderate amount of planning. I make little cue-cards for each warrior of a squad.
2. Building?
You can but I'm better at making war machines and that is more for the regular GDF.
3. Painting?
Like the original Warhammer Fantasy and 40k. I don't really like it but my son greatly enjoys it.
4. Actually playing?
Fun! We've played quite a few battles with this system and my son also plays it with his friends. The turn order and the streamlining of attack-dice compared to Gamesworkshops systems is good. Nobody sits around for half an hour while the other player does their turn.
5. How many guys?
Depends on your army, of course, but I've seen between five and twelve minis fielded in a regular 300 points game.
6. How much money?
Even if you buy original Gamesworkshop figures you can get a 300 points squad in a single box. My son got himself a Tau squad with drones and his friend has a pack of tyranids and that's all you need. Also you can use third-party miniatures or even print and play little cardboard standies, which is basically for free.
One Page Rules Grimdark Future FTL Warfleets
1. Planning?
Quite a bit because you'll be customizing each ship you have. In the end you have a fleet sheet with all the info on it and I like it.
2. Building?
If you want, you can very much build everything you need for this game yourself. I myself have made several fleets and so did my kids. It's fun.
3. Painting?
Oh yes. You can and should paint your ships.
4. Actually playing?
It's good. Four turns of intense space battle are fun.
5. How many guys?
Not guys but ships. A fleet will have five to ten ships plus squadrons if you want those. Nothing too taxing.
6. How much money?
None if you make it all yourself. Well you need dice but you get it.
Tonks!
1. Planning?
Not much. Basic tonks are mostly the same. You _can_ do some customization but these are the "advanced" rules.
2. Building?
Fuck yeah! You can (and must!) make your own tonk. If you don't like crafting, you could use a toy or model tank but seriously, it's about TONK. I use wheels from Kinder Überraschung vehicles for turret mechanisms. You can also use bits of soap dispensers or magnets. Have fun making a crazy tank! If you can't do a turret, a Sturmgeschütz will do as well - just have the cannon attached directly to the hull.
3. Painting?
You probably wanna paint your tonk. But its's not a must. Do what you please.
4. Actually playing?
Short, fun, crazy tonk-battles. Very good.
5. How many guys?
The game posits that every player should field only one tonk but you could conceivably go up to three vehicles per player.
6. How much money?
None, if you do it right.
Wasteland Carfare
This is my own home-brew remake of Gaslands. Play the original if you want more in-depth driving mechanics and stuff. I will release this sometime this year (in both English and German).
1. Planning?
You gotta stat those postapocalyptic cars. It takes some planning.
2. Building?
Take toy cars and upgrade them to postapocalyptic war machines. It's a lot of fun and a great way to use surplus parts from other wargames. Or plastic framing. I used plastic frames and parts of food containers to create some vehicles from scratch even.
3. Painting?
Not strictly necessary but if you want, you can make small works of art out of your vehicles.
4. Actually playing?
I love it, my son finds it meh. I guess your mileage varies. A 100-points-battle usually doesn't last longer than half an hour.
5. How many guys?
A 100-points-warband is between three and six vehicles, usually.
6. How much money?
If you already have toy cars, then practically none. If you don't they are dirt-cheap (or search the sand-pit of a playground near you. You're bound to find some that are even pre-aged for more postapocalyptic style).
An unnamed Kaiju game by my son
My son invented a mech-vs-kaiju-game played with legos in a little lego city.
1. Planning?
You gotta stat your mech or kaiju before battle. There are a number of modules/upgrades/skills to pick from. It's quick enough.
2. Building?
Lego it up. If you like it, you like it.
3. Painting?
Nope.
4. Actually playing?
A battle is through in around 15 to 20 minutes. It's fun enough but probably needs more balancing than a 10-year-old is willing to go for.
5. How many guys?
Just two (plus support in the shape of parasites and tanks, if you choose those).
6. How much money?
If you already own Lego, it's free. If not, then not.
An unnamed Star Wars space battle game by my son
Also made by my son. This one is about space battles and involves ship-to-ship boarding actions and lots of shooting.
1. Planning?
You pick your ship classes, you write down what systems they get. It's fairly quick.
2. Building?
Lego.
3. Painting?
Nope.
4. Actually playing?
Space battle lasts anywhere between ten and thirty minutes. It's cool that you can attempt to board enemy vessels and it can even backfire if you lose your crew. That aspect I like most about it.
5. How many guys?
We played with four vs four ships, which was manageable.
I've started rewatching the three existing Indiana Jones movies recently, whenever family life lets me. Last night I rewatched Temple of Doom, probably for the first time in something around two decades. I have thoughts:
The movie starts out much weaker than its predecessor. The whole jungle sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark was much more evocative than Willy singing in Chinese while two dozen wannabe-Bond-girls in yellowface dance. All in all the opening is trying too hard to be James Bond rather than Indiana Jones, if that makes sense in what is only the second movie of the franchise.
Indy is even more of a thug than in the first movie. Taking a woman hostage like that? The diamond being payment for whatever McGuffin he collected for that guy? And why is he so smug when escaping on the plane - he has nothing to show for? This later turns out to be set-up for character growth. I think.
How many best friends he previously had tons of adventures with does Indy have stashed away all over the world? He can't be more than 40 years old at this point in time. What gives?
Willy is a massively annoying character. So much so that I don't understand how Indy decides to go for seducing her. It's not worth it, dude. It's also obvious that the only thing he sees in her is a pretty face.
The geography is all over the place but let's ignore that. I mean, we don't know how many days the crew spent on that river for it to go from sub-alpine to tropical.
The elephant riding sequence is uneccesarily long.
The gross-out-dinner-scene didn't faze me anymore. Most of the stuff I have eaten in one form or another. Standard backpacker-gotta-try-it-once fare. Snake? Had that in Cambodia (though no live baby snakes. Mine was barbequeued). Beetles? You get that in Bangkok at the night market. Eyes? I didn't but I know plenty of people in Mongolia who swear it's a delicacy. Monkey brains? I only had goose brain but you get my point.
Also these special effects ... were those real baby snakes? Is that a thing somewhere?
I must mention that Short Round is awesome. He is actually outclassing Indy in this movie. Great acting by Ke Huy Quan. The boy was so into it. I'm glad he got back into real acting with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Shame that the Asiansploitation genre had to come into existence for him to get work like that again after growing out of being a cute kid.
The secret entrance to the dungeon in the bedroom is cool. So are the traps, crazy and illogical as they are. They are also much more plausible than those from the first movie, considering this palace is still in use and the bad guys presumably do some upkeep work.
I'd expect the centipedes to be more bitey but that may be my personal fear of that horrible mixture of spider and snake.
The temple is vastly illogical but also awesome as fuck. I'll give Lucas and Spielberg the benefit of the doubt here. Also, this whole human sacrifice sequence is what Lovecraft would have seen in just arriving at the palace topside because of all these horrible non-anglosaxon people.
After being captured it is up to Short Round to save the fucking day. At this point, the movie turns into basically one long, drawn out action sequence. The breaks are off (literally, as we see during the mine cart scene).
Voodoo dolls are more of a Carribean thing, aren't they? Oh whatever floats, Steve and George. I would have saved that one for Indiana Jones and the Creepy Creoles or something like that.
The fight scenes are done really well. Indy is scrappy and tricksy and even tries to rescue the head henchman from a gruesome death (as a hero should). He fails but the effort put into it shows character.
Speaking of the fight scenes: Short Round can take about as many bad guys at the same time as Indy can. Like I mentioned before: This is really his movie. Indy is just the dream big brother he has tagging along.
Willy is fucking useless. She had exactly one scene where what she did was relevant (saving Indy and Short Round out of that trap-room). Before and after that she only screams. A real step down from Marion, from which the franchise would never recover.
Also, Willy has the same name as my grandfather. Which makes me even more angry now that I realized it.
The cart ride is, of course, another iconic moment. Copied a million times, this is peak Spielberg/Lucas. I don't have much else to say about it.
The callback to the sword-to-a-gunfight-scene from the earlier movie is a nice touch – although the fact that this movie takes place bevore the first one implies that Indy just regularly guns down swordsmen. He cannot recall the scene from the last movie like we do.
The rope bridge is also iconic, although to a lesser extent. I like the use of the fact that Indy and Short Round are the only people present who speak Chinese.
Is Indy actually posessed for a moment while the stones drop out of his pouch? I believe so.
The happy end is the colonial forces gunning down the savage rebels. Now that's a political message you don't get to see often these days.
Speaking of rebels: Why bows and arrows? We saw them with rifles and I'm pretty sure I even spotted a machine gun or two in the mines.
Rescuing the village is character development for the Indiana Jones we saw in the beginning of the movie.
Don't pretend like Willy and Indy have any kind of future together, please.
What happened to Short Round after this story? The boy was extremely capable. And dreaming of going to America. Did Indy just ditch him somewhere?
It is the weakest of the three only existing Indiana Jones movies but still entertaining enough. The long action sequence that is the second half is cool to watch and until then you have Short Round to carry the film. It holds up on that end. We'll see how the third movie fares, when I rewatch that.
What exactly makes a dungeon a dungeon? I've previously thought about the minimum size of one but the very nature is something else entirely. I've been working on a series of novellas lately (expect a link to the release of the first one in October – but it'll be in German) and started wondering, what of the adventures my hero has actually constitutes a dungeon.
I believe that there are three hard factors and a checklist of soft factors that make a location into a dungeon. Of course, your personal definition may vary but this one is mine:
A dungeon must be an enclosed location. Open air maze? No dungeon. A dungoen must have some sort of treasure in it. That treasure can be abstract, like an information, knowledge etc.
Now it also needs to confirm with my minimum dungeon size (see link above) so:
A dungeon must not be completely visible from the entrance. If it's just a single, unobstructed room, that's no dungeon.
Let's talk about soft factors. The dungeon should have at least two of these (and it can be multiples in the same category):
A dungeon should have an obstacle. A dungeon should have a riddle. A dungeon should have a trap. A dungeon should have an enemy.
These make up the dungeon-score. Let's put the thing to the test using Indiana Jones (because I'm writing pulp adventure and don't want to spoil my own stories.
The temple in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
-Is an enclosed location. -Has a very obvious treasure. -Is pretty damn big and cannot be overseen from anywhere.
So check for the hard factors. Soft factors? -Has an obstacle (pit that Indy and his lackey swing across). -Has a riddle (the trap trigger underneath the golden idol). -Has (at least) three traps (spikes, arrow-launchers, stone-ball self destruct mechanism) -Whether or not it has an enemy is arguable but let's say it doesn't.
So it comes out with a dungeon score of five. Pretty good.
The excavation site in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark:
-Is an enclosed location. -Has treasure in the form of information: Where is the Ark? -Has nooks and corners.
Check for thard factors. Let's go to the soft factors: -Has an arguable obstacle: Indy needs to climb into the place, after all. -Has a really cool riddle with that staff and the light and all.
This one comes out with a dungeon score of just two but that's enough to qualify (if not much more than that).
The well of souls in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark:
-Is an enclosed location. -Has arguably the most valuable treasure in the world. -Has nooks, corners, and even hidden rooms full of mummies.
Hard factors are check. Soft factors? -Has the same arguable obstacle of needing to climb into it. -Has another obstacle in the shape of a wall Indy must tear down. -Has what is either a trap or an enemy in the form of swarms of snakes.
So it has a dungeon score of three. I have this as a Lego set sitting next to me (my kids gave it to me as a birthday gift). Love it.
What did I watch/read/play? No particular order. And just what comes to mind by being exceptionally memorable, which can be a good or a bad thing. Let's go!
TV shows
Sanctuary was awesome. It's on Netflix, find it, watch it. I never knew much about Sumo but the show is amazing and has a dry sense of humor I really enjoyed. Also it's one of the very few times where forming a team takes the time it should and actually feels earned and hard-won in the end. Cool show, nice acting, interesting setting.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance filled the last quarter of the year for my older son and me. It's been out for a couple of years but I wasn't that much into it, having no nostalgic memories of the movie (watched it first time in my early 20s, I think) and lacking someone who could watch it with me. Now my first-born is old enough and we both got really into it, not just on the in-world-level but also as content creators ourselves, appreciating the puppetry and the set-building that went into that show. It's amazing what they did - but at the same time I understand that something that cost 10 million dollars per episode won't get a second season. Which is sad but also I don't really want to see all the gelflings die so I guess it's fine in the end.
Books
I did do a lot of reading this year, some in my native German (Das Paradies am Rand der Stadt by Volker Strübing should be mentioned - nice sci-fi-story where the AI apocalypse is actually not that horrible, all things considered) and in English. For the sake of my readers I will talk (briefly) about three English-language books that stuck to my memory (all of them can be found for free on the net!):
Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas is a very cool, almost too hip, entry into both beat-literature and Lovecraft lore. Written in the first person as one of the beat-literature heroes (a genre I had no knowledge of beforehands and that feels very much up its own ass but who am I to judge 1950s counter culture?), the book vaguely tells the story of a Cthulhu-apocalypse. It's vivid, it's confusing, it's at time actually horrifying - I liked it.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe. Don't judge me for reading it in my late 30s - how many of the 'great classics' of another culture have you read? Nah, let's talk about the book and its seventh-continent-narrative. Parts of it were very readable, the mutiny-adventure on the high seas, the exploration of unexplored lands - but it felt like the author wanted to also write a textbook on sailing and the nature and wildlife of the subarctic and needlessly sprinkled that into his adventure-novel. The first half of the 19th century was weird, man.
The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale. Speaking of the weirdness of the 19th century. In this early scifi-book, they build a satellite (a sphere made of bricks, intended to be a visible navigational aid for those on the ground). It's made out of bricks in order to survive the heat-friction of launch. The launch accidentally comes too early (they have a huge machine for that, somewhat like a ball-shooter on a tennis court) and there are people inside it. The book mixes visionary ideas well ahead of their time (navigation by means of multiple artificial moons) with the quaintness of American life in the 19th century (the narrator is appalled whten the people on the brick moon don't care about a split in their specific branch of christian sect back home) and some very hard misunderstandings on scientific matters of the time (because of Darwin's theory of evolution, the inhabitants of the brick moon are able to quickly breed all matter of earth-plants from the lichen that was aboard. Orbital mechanics are very wonky). It's interesting to read as a piece of history.
Video Games
There was the usual comfort-food (Streets of Rogue, FTL, Into the Breach) and then there were games I played with my kids (Lego City Undercover, which is Lego GTA; Mario Maker 2; Unravel Two, which is beautiful and makes me yearn for another holiday in Sweden).
I also got back into Trancendence and finally bought the full version of the game. Still a great game, I admire what George Moromisato did by building this entire paracosm and giving us as players a way to experience it. Still have to go further into the 'new' aspects of the game but I like what I see.
Board Games
I played a lot of stuff I made myself this year. Also chess. Not much to report, thus.
Crafting
I made Chrome Dungeon which is a board game for up to four players that I really enjoy. Will make a post about it some time in the future.
Podcasts
My long-time heard favourite German podcast Brennerpass finally made its last episode. I had a sort of love-hate-relationship with the main host so it's alright, I guess. It does leave a gap in my life though. Corey Doctorow's podcast is sometimes very good, sometimes trivial, sometimes annoying, but the man has a manic energy and seems to always work in ways that require days to have at least 40 hours. 99 percent invisible is recommended to any human being interested in the world at all, I love it still. Role Playing Public Radio is a bit too newfangled for me but the Delta Green series is very well made and entertaining. Bad Books for Bad People is probably my favourite podcast this year. Go listen to it.
Music
2023 will be the year I discovered Ümmet Özcan. The man makes music that touches my soul and brings vibes from the central Asian steppes that I really enjoy. Check out his collab with Otyken and you get the soundtrack to my very first role playing campaign. Or do shrooms and then watch the video to Kalimba (which is a piece of art that would probably have been some animator's life work in the pre-AI era that ended a year ago).
The Rest
Didn't really watch an movie that stuck to memory last year. A late-contender could be Rebel Moon, which I watched in the first days of 2024. I find it surprisingly good. I mean it's supposed to be Zack Snyder's Star Wars. And comparing it to that franchise I must say that it's a passable entry. Better than Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 8. Didn't watch Episode 9 or the Han Solo movie though. Because I heard they sucked and I had given up on Star Wars at that point. So, new franchise, new luck.
I also finished writing my first book. Here's to finding a publisher (in German) who is willing to publish retro-pulp adventure that is basically Indiana Jones with more historical accuracy (besides supernatural elements) and explicit sex scenes. We shall see how it fares.
So that was 2023. We'll see what 2024 brings. See ya'll!
A very specific genre of fiction that I absolutely adore is the supernatural maze or lanbyrinth. Technically, most of them are mazes – but I do like the word labyrinth more, especially in my German mother tongue, where it remains "Labyrinth" rather than "Irrgarten" (maze).
Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Le Carceri d'Invenzione - Second Edition - 1761 - 14 - The Gothic Arch
Over the years I have, of course, created several pieces of transcendental maze in media – both as static dungeons on paper, procedural generation things in computer games or even that story-book-experiment I once wrote/designed. And of course my board games, of which there have been several iterations. But what about regular media? Books? Films? Board games...? Here's some I have read/watched/played over the course of the year. And no, Maze Runner doesn't count. Go home, creeps who read YA like a religion. And if you're actually a young adult: How the fuck did you end up on my blog?
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewsky
Can't have this list without that book. The story itself is, of course, a maze. As are the layers upon layers of fiction. Are we in the baseline reality of that dude researching an obscure, possibly nonexistant found-footage-film? Are we in that film? Are we the editor? The crazy old man who had been writing about the film? If they ever make this a movie, they should just go full found-footage and ignore any of the framework. But they probably wouldn't, would they? Difficult read, but it has some glimpses of mad genius shining all throughout the entire crazy thing. Love it or hate it. I love.
Maze by J.M. Mcdermott
At first glance, this is a straightforward story of people getting sucked into a mystical/magical maze. They appear to be from different epochs or worlds and fight a very bleak fight to survive in that crumbling ecosystem full of monsters where humans can just barely make themselves a niche somewhere in the middle o f the food chain. Terrifying at points and then you realize that some of the events don't link up right on a time line. I strongly suspect that if one were to draw all the story's strands on a map, it would itself form a maze with time-loops and everything. I don't have the stomach to work this book like that. It's good.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
What a great book! As far as supernatural mazes go, this one definetly has the most stylish one, consisting of endless halls of marble statues and reliefs that are affected by tides of an ocean below. And there is an ecosystem of birds, seaweed and fish there, which allows the amnesiac main character to survive. Great world building, good main character, nice resolution. The story is straightforward and that's a good thing. Definetely a recommendation from me.
The actual art of Piranesi
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an archaeologist and architect and combined these two skillsets into his artbook Carceri d' Invenzione in 1750. When I first saw these etchings in a gallery in downtown Hamburg when I was a teenager I was fascinated. Later I encountered them in a museum and that's when I heard the name Piranesi the first time. The places depicted are immense, small human figures are seen on some of the walkways and the architecture is recognizable as mediterranean but expanded to a size that is today echoed by high fantasy media. I love 'em and you should too.
Das verrückte Labyrinth
The favourite board game of my childhood. The fact that this design allows for a nearly limitless ways of maze generation and as it stays in constant flux throughout a game it doesn't matter if things link up or not. Each player will just make their path if need be and so new passages keep opening up while old ones get blocked. You can play this very nastily but usually it's worth to just keep your eyes on the prize and go to your next treasure. This was one of the things that inspired me to make my first maze-boardgames. I still like to play it with my kids – we have the original version from the 80s. There are even Harry Potter themed ones now and while I'm usually very much averse to that kind of cash-grab-rebranding in this case it's oddly fitting.
Dave Made A Maze
A film! And with a premise that seems tailor-made for me: Guy who can never finish his creative projects (!) likes to craft with cardboard (!) and makes a maze (!) that is walk-in (!) and much larger on the inside than on the outside (!). Exploration (!), death (!) and hilarity (!) ensue. The film is lovingly made but somehow less than the sum of its parts. This ain't no Shaun of the Dead. But it's still not a bad way to kill the 100ish minutes of its running time. Just don't expect to like most of the characters or the plot resolution too much. Dave, you're a twat.
A bit late to the party, as usual, but here's some nerdier stuff from 2022 that I still remember now that the year is over:
TV Series
The Good:
I didn't watch that many shows this year, besides the many obligatory stream-reruns of Ninjago that our household lives on. What remains memorable is Giri/Haji, a show about a Japanese cop going to London undercover in order to catch his long-lost brother, who is a yakuza killer. I rather enjoyed the humor and the clash of cultures as well as genres. Also: Roy - best character ever, portrayed by the subtly great Tony Way.
Also just about as good ad the hype was (which, as usual, kept me away from it for a while): League of Legends. The only thing I would criticize on this one is the stark tonal shift from the beginning to the end of the show – a friend asked me, after I had seen the thing, if the show would be alright for her daughter to watch. The first episode might give that impression, I said, but after that it gets a bit hefty. Awesome thing as a whole though.
The Bad:
Boy did that Cyberpunk-anime show on Netflix suck. Yeah, it looks cool, but that's about it.
Books
I did get a nice amount of reading done this year – both for my book club and for myself. I re-read a few books, going through our library in order to fill a few evenings in bed. But I also have a new book strongly contending as my favourite book of all time – and it isn't even genre (unless you count the extremely unlikely string of happenstances as fantasy): Grand Tour oder die Nacht der großen Complication by Steffen Kopetzky is an awesome mix of Bildungsroman, comedy, farce, road movie and heist-story. I loved every bit of it – the adventure, the mishaps, the villains, the sex, the weirdo-characters that pepper the road when you're travelling Europe by night-train only, the moments where I feld quite directly singled out with all my personal flaws... I don't think the book was ever translated into any other language, but if you read German, read that book.
I also reread a lot of Dan Simmons because I have his books in my library and he is an awesome writer. The Terror is one of my favourite books of all time and it did hold up on a second read. Of course, since you know most of the end from the very start (it is a book about a doomed arctic expedition that failed in real life after all), the amount of possible spoilers is not that large. Everyone's gonna end up dead/missing. Just how we get there and how nautical the descriptions get is very well executed.
I did read quite a few more books but none stood out like those two. I'm not gonna do a good and bad here as I don't think I read any books that are objectively bad - just ones that didn't fit my taste.
Video Games
There were games I played when I had larger amounts of time and those that had to fill in gaps, comfort-food-style. Sometimes, as the members of my favourite podcast once said, you gotta eat a 20-box of chicken mcnuggets. So: Comfort-Food-Games were Streets of Rogue (once again), FTL and (new in the mix) the awesome and hypermasculine BroForce. Since we got those out of the way, let's get to games I took more seriously as, you know, Games as an Art Form:
Style as well as substance and quite a lot of room for interpretation of the story (sorry I don't agree with the interpretations I found online and I'm going with my own head-canon here: We're playing in the mind of a heavily traumatized woman) is Othercide (please read that with a whisper!). The art style, the music, the general feeling and the brutality of the action makes this my personal favourite when it comes to squad-based tactical games. I can only play it when I'm feeling good because when I'm down this game will drag me even lower but it's quite the piece of art.
The other game that really got me into its atmosphere was Far: Lone Sails. The genre of Sad Boy Walking was never that much my cup of tea but I like sailing and the locomotive that you're sailing in that game is very nicely realized. I feld really distressed and dismayed when it broke towards the end. A nice gaming experience with a clear beginning and ending and lots of lonely adventuring in between. Loved it.
Once again: No "bad" section here. I don't have time or money for bad games.
Board Games
As often, I mostly played stuff I made myself with my older son (and also, towards the end of the year, involving the younger one who is slowly getting old enough to join us at the table/on the carpet). But when it comes to commercial releases, the older 75% of our family has been playing The Adventures of Robin Hood this year. I really enjoy the design of the thing: Its use of a book to bring multiple different adventures on the same map to life, the flipping of bits of said map and the versatility of its tile-less movement system – all great bits that form a very nice whole. Also: Two difficulty settings are very good for a cooperative game like this. We just want to have a good time with the family so usually take the easy way, as this leaves more room for roleplaying and less temptation for one player (me) to try and take command over everyone else.
Crafting
I did do some crafting this year, like started working on a new Labyrinthmaschine and did a lot of smallish projects for the kids. The coolest thing I made was an adapter to connect my smartphone to a 1960s vintage collapsible camera tripod for making YouTube-videos with my son. I've been working with more wood this year and am considering getting a laser cutter in order to make plywood-machines instead of cardboard machines as those would be a lot more long-lasting and could possibly even be repicated/sold.
Podcasts
Two things come to mind regarding podcasts this year: First of all I still listen to The Crate and Crowbar, which by this point is like having old friends in your ear, even though none of the guys (and one gal) are ever going to know I exist, which makes internet-fandom so weird. Deep talk about games by mature people is a genre that I enjoy a lot, I guess.
The other thing that I totally binged was the Archive 81 podcast. It took a sharp turn from season 1 to season 2 but I enjoyed it and stayed aboard for that shift in story-mode. What I don't like is that the makers went dark about their new project which was supposed to hit early 2022 but didn't materialize. No idea what happened behind the scenes but an update would be welcome.
Music
What a year it was as I discovered Mind.In.A.Box for myself. You gotta admire the dedication to make a retro-synthrock band and then, over the course of two decades, keep telling the same long-running story in the form of concept albums. The Broken Legacies album is my personal favourite as it evokes the end of the world, Bladerunner-style, while being musically on point.
Film
The Good
We finally got to watch Parasite and it was at least thought-provoking. As I've watched about half of the rest of Bong Joon-ho's oevre I must say I like the man's style. Also a good movie and old-school murder-mystery was Knives Out, which shows how funny James Bond can be. Bladerunner 2049 was amazing, even though I feared for our walls when the base really kicked in on the soundtrack. Also amazing was Dune – which means that Denis Villeneuve amazed me twice this year.
The Bad
Netflix seems to be unable to make decent mid-tier action movies. The Old Guard was a few years ago, this year we watched Grey Man, Yaksha: Ruthless Operations and Lou. They are all plagued by the same issues: First of all there is the invincible main character (in The Old Guard quite literally), which makes the stakes pathetic. Then there is the very dubious morality: There is usually a character who initially feels that wanton muder isn't cool but by the end these doubts are forgotten and hey, shooting people is fun! And then there is the ending (every. single. time.): The shows love their mains too much and don't dare to let them die a heroe's death. Each of these four movies would have benefited by a heroic sacrifice at the end but pussied out and pulled back at the last second, preventing the films from becoming a well-rounded story. Hated them all, still waiting for Netflix to make a decent one.
Making things
I released Dungeon Urchins (as a game jam entry) and The Swine Pit this year. The latter is the most complex video game I ever made (and I "coded" it myself!), the former one is the first game I ever made that someone paid money for (two dollars - whoever you are: Thank You!). I'll go even more into print-and-play this year, I feel. That's where the money is. Even if it's just a few bucks. I'm currently working on something in that regard. My playtesters (aged 3 to 42) liked it. Just wait for it.
And that's it for 2022. Let 2023 be a better year for mankind.
I've been thinking: What if you made a book that pretends to be a chatbot that pretends to be sentient? Could one do that? I mean, you can have computation of sorts by making a choose-your-own-adventure and have the reader do some of the lifting by following instructions to find certain pages. Then you can add a couple of bits of RAM/Memory like I did with Der Dornengarten. Can you make a book that pretends to have a conversation with the reader, arguing for its own sentience, perhaps even be convincing in it? I'll have to ask a friend who studied philosophy what the killer arguments would be and then make up ways to have them flow into a conversation where one side can only pick out of multiple-choice answers like they're playing a video game. It's just an idea but what if...
I like my fantasy more medieval than the mainstream these days does it. Outside having an aristocracy, most fantasy authors basically seem to transfer ideas of old-west frontiersmanship into a medieval setting. Lone farmsteads, guarded by farmers with shotguns crossbows. While this does make a murderhobo-fantasy more plausible, it really irks me. So do ginormous fortresses a la World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings. Like - who would have built this? With what manpower? Why?
I really dislike false modernisms in my fantasy. If you want street lamps and cell phones, please, by all means, use a modern setting. Urban fantasy is great in allowing you to do magic and swords while having all conveniances of modern civilization. If you can't think without smartphones, then don't. Fuck speaking stones. Fuck eternal lights. Let me state it here:
ANY SUFFICIENTLY MUNDANE MAGIC IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM TECHNOLOGY.
There, I said it. If every other dude can cast light/bread/whatever, there is no medieval society. Nope.
So magic better be rare, hard, opaque, weird, dangerous. Have the supernatural as a hint, not an everyday thing. And don't forget: If you can actually feel your god's power via visible and undeniable miracles they work through your or someone else's hands – please don't call it fucking faith.
My older son and I have been playing a round of Heroica every couple of nights now. We have some hous rules, such as bosses having different stats/abilities and the shop being an actual location you have to go to. I've been wanting to make that store part of a small village for a while. This would not only make the world bigger but also give the heroes a home location they need to return to every once in a while to stock up on consumables and equipment. Now I don't have the studded 2x2 plates needed for actual Heroica-style tiles yet (they should be in the mail to me) but I do have build a village:
The store, to the right, is the same one (but I added a window in order to make it more clear that this represents an actual building. The inn is in the background. The place has two tables and a bar, seating up to ten microfigures. A jug from that barrel costs a gold piece and heals one HP – it's for situations where you can't afford a health drink (or they're sold out). The village square has a nice tree in the center and to the left there is a path to the graveyard.
Speaking of the graveyard: That's the new home of the Vampire now. Lacking some parts of the desert temple set that the Golem Lord resides in, that dude needed a new home and now rules over the flooded catacombs that originally belonged to the Vampire. Also, the vampire's minions, zombies and bats, fit well with the graveyard. Naturally, my son wanted in on the construction of the village and added his own stuff. It looked like this:
A grassy area, another store and a long secret tunnel are his additions. I had to swallow my perfectionist pride once again (having sworn never to become the dad from the Lego Movie) and just let him add to the world without any regard on playability or coherent design. Let him do it, it's his Lego now. In that picture you see the bigger crypt (with the cross) that the vampire will reside in. When he dies, he turns into the giant bat, arguably the most powerful of the bosses in our Heroica-world. That means that, despite him sitting right next to the starting village, it is advisable to go after the other bosses first in order to stock up on magical and non-magical gear before facing that monster.
Our fully assembled Heroica-world now has four regions: The village with the graveyard (boss: The Vampire/Giant bat), the forest of Waldurk (boss: The Dark Druid), the catacombs of Ilrion (boss: The Golem Lord) and the Fortress of Fortraan (boss: The Goblin King). The Vampire gets replaced by the vampire bat upon his death, which has 4 HP and deals damage equal to its remaining life. The Dark Druid has no special rules yet. The Golem Lord summons a bat everytime he wounds an enemy. The Goblin King has the helmet and thus an extra HP. Each of them has a magical item that can be looted – and usually some gold stashed by their lair.
I have also made some slight changes to the character rules. As we play cooperatively, you can pass items back and forth when close to one another. The knight no longer has the jump+stab special move but can roll a save die when hit, the shield preventing damage. The jump+stab is now the domain of the prince. The king has no special move, he is kinda old after all. Also, the archer is female in our games and I intend to buy some microfigs online to add one or two more girls to the mix. Shame that Lego didn't even have a token female among the heroes originally.
Next up: A play report of our first big campaign involving said village.
My first-born and I have been playing Heroica every once in a while now. When Lego released this little board game with a dash of fantasy-rpg mixed in there, I was stoked but quickly disappointed when I actually read the rules of the one set I bought. Now, years later and as a father of two sons, I see where its target audience lies. And I know that hacking this is part of the design.
We've been lucky enough to acquire a few additional sets from a friend of mine at an okay price (the full sets have become somewhat expensive since they're out of production). We do not play in competition but in cooperation. That means, the monsters barely stand a chance. We do have permadeath for characters but each of us usually has two characters spare waiting for the first one to die.
Our current landscape. (c) 2020 Me on my Blog.
My son with his five years loves the thing. A usual run through all the lands we have usually takes us around 45 minutes, a good time for a kid his age. He generally spends the next thirty to sixty minutes after that playing with no rules and making his own stories into that world. It's really rather excellent and something I totally didn't account for when I bought the game as a university student with no offspring in sight.
Some things need to be changed about the monsters in order to make them more different from each other. The Goblin King in our game usually has that helmet-thingy and thus an additional HP. The Vampire can, of course, replace himself upon his death with the Giant Bat which has four HP and a damage rating equal to its HP – it is out of the box the most interesting beast in the game. Still trying to figure out how to make the Druid and the Golem Lord more interesting without breaking the game.
I also intend to make the game bigger and perhaps even add come characters. This will cost me some money and I need to scour BrickLink for some items but I think it could work. Perhaps a central village and one or two new landscapes with enemies like spiders and rats can be done without too much trouble. Also some female heroes are totally in order. When I get around to all that. Perhaps, when my second son becomes old enough to join us.
As I am now a father and busy with other projects, such as the (German language) NPConline, where I am editor-in-chief of all things text. I have recently left this place here to its own devices. But now that my son is slowly getting into an age where play starts to have any meaning, I intend to return here sometimes, be it only to note what we're doing. The roguelike board game I've been working on is also still in the making – the prototype has been feature-complete for a while and a friend of mine is currently making art for it. I think it's gonna be amazing. Anyhow, let's talk about randomness in board game design – it's not as bad as its reputation!
I somewhere read that an action sequence needs more than just a static battleground. This is as true for an RPG as it is for any movie - you better have something going on around you, surroundings influencing things, hazards, all that jazz. So this week, I had my players fight - in a pit.
Good action movies know that the set is as important as the action that takes place in it. Take anything Jackie Chan does, for example. The sets and props really take center stage. If he could get a hovercraft for a day, you better believe that there will be a way to integrate it into the plot. The best action scenes are running gun-battles or fighting on a moving train or scenery falling down around the characters, threatening to crush either combatant at any moment. This is something where computer RPGs often fail - and so does traditional gridmap DnD.
You CAN put rules into the game that make things more interesting. Say, this and that hex/square/area spout hot steam every X turns, doing damage. Often this just creates no-go zones for PCs and enemies. If you present an enemy stupid enough to run into danger face-first, the battle threatens to become a riddle. Where do you need to place yourself in order to lure the monster into X? That's why I prefer freeform storytelling in battles, sprinkled with some dice-rolls to keep things unpredictable to both the players and myself as the game master.
The two surviving PCs of a small foray into ancient underground ruins were fleeing. Their friend lay dead, killed by their own bullets, in a crypt behind them. The monsters were chasing. The underground complex terminated in a huge drill-shaft. To get back topside, they would have to climb - there were rusted metal bars forming a ladder, alongside which a steel cable was hanging. The group had used the cable to secure themselves when they were climbing down. So one of them took to the ladder, the other tried climbing the cable, when the praying mantis-like aliens emerged from the tunnel right beneath their feet.
The battle was a vertical chase between the PCs, armed with firearms with little or no ammo, and the aliens that were limited to their raptorial legs. It was tossing down empty guns onto the following monsters, rolling for stamina to stay ahead, rolling acrobatics to swing over to the ladder etc. In a desperate last-ditch, one of the two, the teams socialistic terrorist bomb builder, hung herself upside down by her injured legs to fight one of the monster hand-to-hand - and won. The interesting part was the verticality: You could lose your grip and fall, and there was no regular trading of blows with something that is hacking at your legs.
Thanks to some astronomic luck in dice-rolls, both PCs got out of the hole alive, although said revolutionary almost bled to death on the way up. I really liked the vertical battle and will implement such features more often n the future. Tactical inequality is always nice. The only thing the whole thing was missing was moving parts, like enormous drill looming above coming to life or something but the industrial plant on that planet had been left alone for eight decades. I couldn't imagine it still working, as scavengers had picked over it and ripped out all useful parts. Well - next time.
One of my players in our sci-fi pen & paper campaign complained that there wasn't enough player-interaction going on in the game. Being as he was the pilot, that was true. Being a fair GM, I thought I needed to change that. Being also a somewhat rough GM that I am, things went bad quickly. Well, the goal is for everyone at the table to have fun. Most things did work out. Read on to find out how things went!
Some people say that the pilot of a sci-fi campaign should better be an NPC, as all they have to do is fly everyone else from A to B and whenever they get action, everyone else is just strapped into their seats anyways. I usually try to levie that by having the others busy with quick-repairs and fending off boarders forming from the very walls of their own ship. Yeah, it's a rather high-tech setting. Now over the past few sessions, there really wasn't much dangerous piloting or space-combat to be done, just exploring an ancient tunnel system in a planet/optical computer/religious site. And they always left the pilot behind so yes, he got bored.
So I started with, when the rest of the crew returned to the ship and they started loading up loot into their cargo-bay, having the pilot see different stuff than everyone else. The implications were clear, as the pilot spent most of his time linked to the ships computer he would be the first target to any sort of cyber-attack. As the crew spend most of their free time in a VR simulation of whatever they like, the rest would fall too but they hadn't had a break for a while. So the pilot is going crazy, seeing an intruder who, after some testing by the chief of security, isn't there although she ship does react as if they were. The result is that the pilot gets knocked out with a phaser and restrained in the med-bay, where he spends the rest of the session, while the rest of the crew shuts down the computer core and fights the two escaped prisoners whom they had brought from another system.
I do agree that I kind of pushed my pilot into open rebellion against his comrades. He got phasered and forced to inactivity for most of the session, which was a bummer for him as a player but at least everyone else got to interact a lot with all the suspicion, threats, pulling of rank and discussion appropriate for the tense situation of being in a ship with a computer compromised by a vastly superior enemy.
I will have to find ways of doing this without the group restraining each other or going all-out PvP in the future. After all, we're all at the table to enjoy ourselves.
I have recently started to play Canabalt again, mostly because I needed something to kill time while on public transport, and it still is a strikingly simple yet elegant game to play. Let's analyze a bit.
I needed something to play on my Android-phone. Something that starts up and ends quickly, as I would sometimes only play in bursts of three or four minutes. Something that works on a small resolution, because my phone is rather small. Something with simple but reliable input, preferably being among the very few Apps that actually recognize my slide-out keyboard because I highly dislike gaming with a touchscreen where my thumb obscures a third of the screen and the input precision is less than good anyways. TempleRun, while still being touch-controlled, was alright for a while but whenever the bus or subway train I was on turned, the phones sensors would interpret that as a tilt and that would lead to in-game troubles. So I came back to Canabalt, downloaded myself the HD-Paid-Version. It is as glorious as I remember.
The appropriate thing for the game to do in any situation I want to play things on my cellphone in is in the minimalistic and simple input. There are only two variables to player-input in Canabalt, one being when you press jump and the other being how long you press it. That's all. The first four seconds of the game are always the same, putting three obstacles in your way, first two random office-objects, then the drop behind that window. Only if you miss all three jumps, you will fall to your death. Then the game is, of course, on.
Whilst playing Kerbal Space Program recently, I've been thinking about the different types of progress characters in games, in both video- and pen & paper RPG, make towards overcoming challenges set by the game or a game master better. Here's what I've come up with regarding character growth in games.
Three types of character growth, actually, if you completely disregard story, lore, context and all these things that get in the way of talking about pure game-mechanics. Of these three types of growth, only one is immanent in the game itself, which is the first I'll talk about here: Character growth.
Or how I learned to stop playing Oblivion and love gaming instead...
So, here it is: I stopped playing Oblivion six months ago. Martor is on ice, probably forever. Why is that? Allow me to explain and get into a broader topic on gaming in general: Grinding. The word itself implies something tedious and that opens up a lot of questions on why one would even want to play something that is based on grind. Follow me into a new article. Also, I'll write more regularly again, now that I'm back from Asia. I promise to all three of you who may or may not care. God this place has fallen apart after my mom died...
Aaaaanyways. Grinding. WTF? Aren't games supposed to be fun? Well I didn't really think about it for a long time. I had stopped playing Oblivion after day three of my experiment (which was like two months after day 1 but it was day three of actually playing) but I didn't really analyze why. I just didn't feel like playing it anymore. It felt horribly tedious. The magic was gone.
So, last month I started playing a new game, FTL. If you like space-exploration, roguelikes or having adventures in general, you should check out some Let's Plays on Youtube and then decide to buy it (or not, you boring, boring person!). I played it quite a bit and then, at one time upon re-starting, the usual hint at the bottom of the starting message told me that I should stay in what the game itself called 'the grinding sectors' for longer if possible as to gather resources for the later stages of the game while it was still somewhat harmless to do so. This got me thinking, because while I had done just that before already, having found out fast that getting to the end quickly is a recipe for getting overwhelmed real soon. But it never felt like a grind to me. Why? Because this was the meat of the game. It was fun. Why do we play games? Because they are fun, mostly. Well they may evoke other emotions (Silent Hill 2 certainly wasn't fun and Shadow of the Colossus made me feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders but I digress) but tedium shouldn't be one of them.
Yeah, I said it. A lot of gamers hate the game. I play it occasionally, whenever they update new maps and I'm sitting on the bus to work. Never really thought about it. But now that I'm travelling through Asia again (something I'm bound to do every once-in-a-while), I realize that I've been ignorant at the scale that this phenomenon of a game has around the planet. Let's talk about it.
When I first played Angry Birds, I was late to the party. That was summer last year, on the laptop of my in-laws in Mongolia. It was a PC version, localized and translated into Mongolian, something I found odd as most stuff with the exception of movies isn't translated into Mongolian, because it is a developing nation of only a few million, not really a large market to tap. Was that version fan-made? Possibly. It didn't matter all that much anyways, as I quickly found out: The game is designed to be playable by someone entirely illiterate, like young children or people who cannot even read Latin letters. The games cut-scenes and little cartoons explaining how different types of birds work like the comics that explained weapons in World War II to illiterate resistance fighters in the Pacific are simple and can be understood by at least 90% of human beings living on earth right now. It's brilliant in its simple elegance, really. Like gaming is a universal language or something poetic like that. That was what I thought last year.
In the last post I started the little Gedankenspiel on how a supernatural reanimation of corpses to zombies here in my home-city of Hamburg would play out, which can be useful as a backdrop for a role-playing campaign. Let's keep this show going by moving on to the next stage of the infestation of the now spreading Z and the finally reacting government agencies from outside the city.
A few years ago, I hosted an roleplaying one-shot session for a few friends of mine with a simple conceit: You're playing realistic characters in a zombie apocalypse here in our home city of Hamburg, Germany. The second largest city in the country, we have the Bernhardt-Nocht-Institute for tropical diseases so there we would have the cause for the zombie-outbreak. I excessively used google maps and our own knowledge of the city for the campaign, which had three random survivors simply trying to reach the central police station from a southern part of the city, having to cross the port and the river in the process.
Now if you're going to play in the current day, why not take a place everyone at the table knows and can relate to? Where all you need maps-wise is available on line? Exactly. This has lead me to a new thought experiment though: How would a zombie-infestation in my city actually turn out? Let's find out!
